Mojang & Humble Indie Bundle to Make a Game for Charity
If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at game design, this is your chance. Mojang, the company behind the insanely popular Minecraft, and the Humble Indie Bundle, an ethical retailer of indie games who offers limited time bundles for however much you choose to pay, have decided to get together and make a game for charity.
And Mojang will build the game based on the ideas you, as the buyer of the game, provide.
The appropriately named Mojam Bundle lets you pick from a bunch of different themes for your preferred genre and style. But it won’t be straight...
Kickstarter Gets its First 2 - $1 Million Projects on the Same Day
Things are looking up for Kickstarter, a small company dedicated to crowd-sourcing interesting projects and products. On the very same day two projects crossed the $1 million line in funding, which had never been crossed before.
The first project to cross the line is an interesting iPhone 4 dock that doesn’t suffer from the shoddy design that the official one does. Not only does it look nicer, when you pick the phone up out of the dock, you don’t have to hold the dock down.
The other project to cross the line did it with a bit more fanfare, despite...
Harvard Wants the Next Zuckerberg, Gates to Stay in School
Harvard University is sick and tired of university students going and making themselves crazy rich without ever actually getting a degree from the school. Which is why the company has announced the Experiment Fund, a company incubator available to those who stay in school.
The Experiment Fund would give 4-6 startups each year $250,000-$500,000 in financing to launch their company. It will focus on providing early-stage financing to companies in the Cambridge, Mass. area, presumably covering other top tech schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, otherwise known as MIT.
Modern tech leaders seem to have a habit of dropping...
Ex-Stanford Professors Starting Free Online College
Ever dreamed of getting a Stanford-level education for free, complete with tests, grades and certificates of completion? Well, soon your dream will be a reality.
The two professors behind that free online artificial intelligence class decided, seeing the success of their first pilot class, that they should develop an entire free curriculum.
Sebastian Thrun originally created his “intro to Artificial Intelligence” as a bit of an experiment. He partnered with Peter Norvig, author of the definitive text on artificial intelligence and created a series of Youtube videos with interactive quizzes. They quickly had over 160,000 people signed...
Tablet Ownership has Doubled to 19%, According to Pew Study
According to a study that Pew just released, 19% of American adults now own a tablet. That’s double what it was at the beginning of last December. Proof that tablets well and truly are taking over the world.
The rapid growth is in part an illusion, however. Pew tracked a temporary lull in growth during the second half of 2011, which, if taken with the massive spike around Christmas, means that the lull might just have been done so the tablets could be given as gifts. Even factoring this in, however, this is still an impressive growh...
500 million Chinese Now Access the Internet
A report published by the admitedly not-entirely-unbiased China Internet Network Information Center, based, a state-operated entity, released a report revealing just how quickly China is growing to dominate the internet. CINIC reveals that fully 37% of China’s population is accessing the internet, which is 513 million people.
An interesting fact, though, is that 70% of those accessing the net are accessing it through a mobile phone. Of course, a careful reading of the report shows that the number of actual internet users might be quite a bit lower: the report considers someone as internet connected if they have logged...
Homeless New Yorker Up for Intel's Science Competition
Samantha Garvey is an aspiring Marine Biologist. She has applied to Yale and Brown Universities, and has reached the semifinals in Intel’s Science Competition.
She is the picture of an upper-class American being bred for success--except that, at this very moment, she and the rest of her family are homeless. but thanks to her success in the Science Competition, they aren’t going to stay that way for long.
On New Years day, Samantha Garvey and her parents were evicted from their Long Island, NY home. Even in the most troubled neighborhoods, such as Brentwood, have extremely high housing prices....
Learn to Code through Competition with CodeRacer
Learning is hard. Like, really hard. Making abstract things go from concepts on paper (or on a computer screen) to concepts in our head is an arduous process wrought with many, many repititions and plenty of boredom. Treehouse, a company dedicated to teaching its subscribers how to code, is hoping to change that. Through competition.
CodeRacer is a game by Treehouse that plays a bit like 2-player Tetris. You are given a task to complete that is worth a certain amount of points, say adding in a header. You rush to get the header up...
Kickstarter Seeded Nearly $100 Million to Crazy Ideas Last Year
Looks like Kickstarter had a killer 2011: the independent project funding site had $99,433,382.00 pledged with 46% of projects successfully getting funding.
There were 11,836 successful projects. The founder claimed that 84% of all pldges ended up collected. For comparison, there were only 3,910 successful projects in 2010 with $28 million in funding.
Kickstarter has provided funding for many interesting projects that otherwise would never have made it past the drawing board. The range from the mundane, like an open source flashlight design to the clever, like this camera clip system, to the fun, like this iPod Nano watch band,...
'Daily Show' Watchers are 'Deep', says research
‘Daily show’ watchers might not be the ‘stoned hippies’ that Bill O’Reilley makes them out to be: in a bit of psychological research conducted at the University of Delaware, ‘Daily Show’ watchers were found to be deep.
Or, as Dannagal Young, assistant professor of communication and lead researcher said, "there is a segment of the political satire audience that is motivated by a deeper level of processing." That sounds much more scientific, don’t you think?
The study sampled 398 college students about their tv preferences. Paying special attention to political satire, she found that many who watch political satire...
Teens Still Prefer Meeting Face-to-Face Approaches!
Yes, all misconceptions aside, teens still prefer to meet their friends in person rather than texting or any other method, according to a new study by Ericsson. When asked for the top three forms of communications they would miss the most, over half stated that they would miss face to face meetings the most, with 8% saying that they would miss it the second most.
Despite its decline in much of the world, texting remains very strong here in the States, with 26% of those polled saying that they would miss texting the most, and 28% stating that they would...
The Economist claims Tablets have Revived Reading
It’s a classic refrain: modern people don’t read. But thanks to tablets, the Economist claims that is no longer true (if it ever was). They claim that tablets have driven up the consumption of the written word and that they are responsible for reinvigorating a dying medium.
They call it the “rebirth of reading,” and claim that it means we’ll have to fundamentally revisit how we approach publishing on the web and in print.
A few key points they mentioned in their presentation were:
42 percent of tablet readers read in-depth content often, and 40% read them at least occasionally Those...
Half of Young Adults Would Choose Internet over a Car
Well that’s an interesting shift. In a study performed by Gartner Research, 46% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 would choose internet access over a having a car. This isn’t a small survey, either; this study has been ongoing for a decade.
This is a shift away from a half century of dominance by the automobile. Since the 1950’s, cars have been liberators: they can take you to faraway places, let you explore what you haven’t seen, and free you from the constraints of public transportation. They were the very symbol of what America...
Gizmodo Gallery In NewYork ThisWeek
Okay, so Gizmodo may technically be a competitor. But they are still cool guys, and they are running a nifty gallery up in New York this week known, simply, as the Gizmodo Gallery. If you love tech and you live nearby, you should stop by.
What is it? Gizmodo staff plays with lots of technology each year, and they tend to have favorites. The Gizmodo Gallery is their chance to showcase the nifty, cool and just plain weird pieces of technology that they encountered over the previous year. This year, they are featuring everything from Instaprint, a small...
Bradbury Still Thinks Internet Is Meaningless
Have you ever read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? In the book, Bradbury imagines a world where technological progress murders books--and with it, all deep thought and thinking. It’s understandable, then, that he has been a bit of a holdout when it comes to ebooks. None of his novels have been available in digital form... Until now.
During a renegotiation with his publisher, Simon & Schuster, Ray Bradbury finally gave into pressure to have his book digitised and sold online. Soon, the famous novel about censorship will finally be able to be bought digitally, albeit for a...
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